Covering the U.S.-China relations beat with the FT's Demetri Sevastopulo
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2022
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes veteran Asia reporter Demetri Sevastopulo, who covers the U.S.-China relationship for the Financial Times. They discuss some of Demetri's scoops, like the news that Vladimir Putin had requested military aid from Xi Jinping, leaked just before National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's meeting in Switzerland with State Councillor Yang Jiechi and just three weeks after Russia's invasion; and the news that China had tested a hypersonic glide craft in October of last year. But the focus of the discussion is on the Biden administration's China policy and its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an Asia strategy that, by all accounts, has met with a tepid response in the region.
1:47 – How Demetri landed a beat as U.S.-China relations correspondent
5:24 – How the FT scooped the story on Putin's military assistance request to Xi Jinping in March 2022
12:05 – The Chinese hypersonic glidecraft
24:42 – The DC China policy scene: A dramatis personae
40:11 – The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework: all guns and no butter
52:54 – The Quad and AUKUS: American-led security arrangements
A full transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com
Recommendations
Demetri: Gunpowder, an Irish gin from County Leitrim; and Roku, a Japanese whiskey by Suntori
Kaiser: Chokepoint Capitalism, a forthcoming book on how monopolies and monopsonies are ruining culture, by Rebecca Gilbin and Cory Doctorow
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 0:15.0 | Subscribe to SubChina's daily, newly designed China Access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds |
| 0:21.9 | of different news sources or check out all the original writing on our website at subchina.com. |
| 0:27.4 | We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, |
| 0:33.2 | and of course, a growing library of podcasts. |
| 0:36.3 | We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations |
| 0:39.1 | to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples |
| 0:44.6 | in China's Xinjiang region to China's travails as it wrestles with a surging wave of COVID-19. |
| 0:51.6 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 0:57.7 | We cover China with neither fear nor favor. |
| 1:00.9 | I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:05.0 | Today on Cineca, I am delighted to welcome a journalist whose work many of my peers and doubtless |
| 1:10.3 | many of the listeners |
| 1:11.0 | admire as much as I do, Dmitri's have a stop below of the Financial Times. |
| 1:15.5 | Dmitri is, to the best of my knowledge, the only reporter working for a major outlet |
| 1:20.1 | whose beat is specifically the U.S.-China relationship. |
| 1:24.9 | On that beat, just in recent months, he's managed quite a number of scoops |
| 1:29.1 | and breaking stories. We'll talk to him about some of those, as well as a longer piece he recently |
| 1:34.6 | published, that takes a critical look at the Biden administration's China policy. Dmitri joins us |
| 1:40.0 | from Washington, D.C. Dmitri, Sevastopolo, welcome to Seneca. |
| 1:48.0 | Thanks, Kaiser. It's great to be with you. Yeah, it's long overdue, long overdue. |
| 1:54.9 | Okay, so I think I am first obliged to ask you how you landed this plum job. I mean, was this a beat that the FT editors had all along and I just didn't know about it? Or was it created and you know, |
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